I think this is a troll, but I'll respond anyway. The belief in a God (or several), while spiritual, is not necessarily religious, so I'm not immediately offended by Bush's statement. He doesn't specify which God, or even that he specifically means one specific God. I'm a wishy-washy agnostic, and I personally find religion distasteful, in general. But, if the President of my country is a Christian, that's fine with me, as long as he doesn't force me to be a Christian. In Iran, religious sins are illegal, and severely punished. In America, SOME religious sins are illegal, mainly because they hinder the functioning of society in some way. The fact is that most religious sins are sins because they are bad for society. The problem is that legislating them can enable fundamentalists and other extremists to take things too far.
Of course, religious groups will always try to legislate their agenda, just as the large media companies try to legislate theirs. And some of it gets passed, and most of it doesn't. This is what checks and balances are for, and we have them precisely so one President who panders to a particular religious group will not destroy the nation and it's religious freedom.
If we start hurting or discriminating against Muslims because people who were Muslim attacked the US (even if they claimed to do it in the name of Islam), then we are taking away the religious freedom of everyone. There are many Persians that are not Muslim, but they don't go advertising it. We can, with lame-ass symbols on our cars like the fish, Star of David, or Darwin-Fish-with-Legs - or however we like to do it.
An interesting note... Arab Muslims and Persian (Iranian) Muslims follow different sects of Islam. They are akin to the Protestant and Catholic sects of Christianity. They don't get along all that great, from what I hear, at least when it comes to religion... much in the way Catholics and Protestants have a distaste for each other. (I know some 7th-Day Adventists that don't even consider Catholics Christian, but that's somewhat extreme). I believe that Arabs are primarily Sunni and that Persians, and many other kinds of non-Arab Muslims, are mostly Shi'a.
The problem with Iran is that it is run by an extremist religious government, just like Afghanistan was with the Taliban. Most Arab nations, such as Lebanon, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, are 90% Muslim, but the clergy does not hold absolute political power, as they do in Iran. One thing they ingrain into our minds here in the US is the importance of the seperation of Church and State. I think we grow up knowing that it is important, without necessarily understanding why. When you see what a Church-run-State does to a country (under the Shah, Iran was a much nicer place to live), I think it makes a lot more sense.
I think religious governments do tend to be extremist, and extremist governments are dangrerous, which is why we fear Iran right now. I know several Persians, and I don't know any of them that wanted the Ayatollah Khomeni's revolution, and they certainly don't like the current religious regime. It's just important to seperate the religion and people of a country from the government.
Why, that's a fantastic idea. I think I'll set a good long-term goal for myself and ratify the Kyoto Protocol at my earliest convenience.
I like to set small goals that might lead into larger ones, like making toast: this might lead into making a sandwich, and possibly my own space program. -- Stephen Wright (I think)
I got my girlfriend a PlayStation for Valentines Day one year. She thought it was the best Valentines Day gift she'd ever gotten.
The best gifts are things you wouldn't ever get yourself, but you find you can't live without once you have them. Cash/gift certificates might be useful, but they are terribly unthoughtful.
Besides, younger girls are far less chained to the 50's female gender roles that so many people can't get their heads around. Many girls actually like math and science, and like to hammer things or work on the car. My younger (female) cousin ASKED for a toolset last christmas. And, yes, she hugged it when she got it - but the point is that these stupid male/female roles don't make as much sense anymore. And good riddance to them!
Now, I'm going to go take a nice hot bubble bath...
There may be javascript tricks you could do with HTML too, now that I think about it.
Yeah, actually... I haven't played with Mozilla much, I'm sure there's a relatively simple way to do it, but with IE and hidden iframes, you can send and retrieve arbitrary data to the server without reloading the page at all. Since IE can dynamically rewrite (almost) any part of the page, you can update the data on your page, or even the UI, while still working off of the same "document". Great examples of how this is used well are all the web apps for doing taxes that I saw this year. Hell, look at MSDN online, they use DHTML all over the place to make it just that much nicer for the user. It was very nearly like using a native application, except no downloads and a little slower at runtime.
Most of what you would want to do is also possible in NS 4, but not nearly as easy as in IE. And NS 4 is definately quirkier in this aspect, and more prone to crash.
Even cooler is IE 5+'s (and I think Mozilla, now, but I think the mechanism is slightly different) ability to generate and view HTML pages with XSL + XML on the client side. So you could hit a site, and it would return an XML document with a processing instruction specifying the location of the XSL... IE will just grab the XSL and use it to transform the XML into HTML, and then display that resulting HTML. That's okay, but also easily done on the server side. The really interesting thing is that you have access to both the XML document and the XSL document via a DOM interface from the client-side javascript. So you can modify your XSL document and then re-transform parts of the XML document into HTML snippets, and then replace parts of the current page with the resulting HTML.
It makes for a very responsive web application - feels like a sluggish native app instead of a set of web pages - but it locks you down to a platform fairly prohibitively. NS 4, Opera, Lynx and most other "independent" browsers do not have XML+XSL support, so you pretty much lock those out. You can't use the same XSLs for server-side transforms and client-side transforms if you want to do the dynamic client-side stuff, really. There might be a way to do a Mozilla and IE cross-platform solution with this, but I haven't investigated it at all.
We did a lot of this at my last company. We had a web application for managing certain database objects, and you could run searches and you'd get back a data set by loading the data (as XML) in a hidden frame, then we could sort the data by making a strategic change to the XSL in memory and retransforming a strategic part of the XML, so it happened in a blip. We even supported pagination completely on the client - we were in a situation where the client to server network connection wasn't really the bottleneck, since both were intended to be on the same internal network. Client memory/rendering speed was the bigger bottleneck. Both bandwidth and table-rendering speed cause this sort of thing to really stop scaling for larger datasets. It also uses a TON of memory, because the (w3c) DOM is a bit heavy, and with this method IE retains everything in a DOM, whether you like it or not.
I suppose this is all somewhat off-topic to a story about a search engine, but this happens to be something I have worked with recently, so I thought I would mention it.
Other good DHTML links:
Dan Steinman's Dynamic Duo - an good tutorial and DHTML platform abstraction library in JavaScript, but quite a bit slower at runtime than hand-coded DHTML
HTML Guru - the site wasn't working too well for me just now, but last time I saw it, it did a good job of looking impressive while still being pure HTML+JS and cross-platform.
I would love to look up to a moon glowing with cities and life! I would finally feel like I'm living in the 21st century. It's not like we are endangering wildlife...
No kidding... most people I know are incessant channel changers, and I am happy to put up with commercials as long as I don't miss part of the show I want to watch.
I remember the first episode of the Max Headroom TV show, they had these commercials that went by super fast, and they found that people would subliminally pick up the message. But then they found that people would explode if they watched those commercials too much. Ironically, I feel that way when people switch channels too much, and less that way by enduring the commercials for 3 minutes.
Why is thinking of humanity targets in ages of hundret years so wrong?
Because then the people living and working towards those goals will not live to see the results. And as much as advancing faster than we can "handle" is probably a bad idea (shortsighted, anyway), not living to see the fruits of our labors is a pretty terrible thought, in my mind. It's selfish, but at least it's realistic. I want to rent an apartment on the moon! I want to live to be 200! I want to have a cybernetic big toe with oil slick attachment! Now!!!
[...] a boss of mine once said we should never use comments that have the word "hack" or "bug" or "incomplete" because the comments could be used against you in a lawsuit.
Damn, I never even though of that. It's probably quite true. What a pain! I guess the solution is to come up with some code words for these things, like "PURPLE=HACK" and so on. Then we can say "Man, this code is PURPLE!"
1) We can demand experience. We don't have to take the time to train someone and get them up to speed.
I've mentioned this before, but experience is not the best metric to determine whether someone is worth of employment. Sometimes you will get a better employee, and consequently better work, from hiring someone who is talented, enthusiastic and "gets it," but has little domain experience, than you would if you hired someone with top experience.
The reason is that experience is misleading. Intuitively you think that experience maps directly to skill/productivity in the general case. But, I've seen too many people with tons of experience that can't DO anything PRODUCTIVE (or what they do is misguided, error-prone and/or impossible to maintain). And I've seen green folks who can just pick up, figure out things and get it done quick and done right. Of course, someone who is talented, motivated AND has 10 years experience will probably truly be "a badass," but there isn't the supply of these people that you think.
My favorite metric for looking at new hires is: Do they do this stuff at home? Even if they like to do stuff that is only somewhat similar to what you want them to do, and at an amateur level, if they do it on their own time for their own edification, it's probably because they like it... and people get good at doing the things they like real quick.
The long-term approach to hiring is to find someone that's a better programmer (or whatever) in general... even if it takes some traning to get productive with a specific domain, you'll eventually have a good employee with the domain knowledge you need, rather than a mediocre employee who knows the things you want right away. Oftentimes it's more convenient to grab the guy that knows the most right away, but you could end up with average or sub-average staff in the long run, which will turn into a nightmare.
Conversely, of course, you need someone with expert domain knowledge to be leading the charge, so that people do not re-invent the wheel. To require everyone to have that level of knowledge, though, is not only overkill, but likely counterproductive, as they will disagree on things that they think everyone just knows.
This is more from a development perspective than an IT perspective... perhaps the domains are different enough where these observations don't really apply.
Well, one of the ideas behind Refactoring is that the code should be self-documenting. i.e. function names should convey the purpose of the function, and variable names should convey the purpose of the variable. If you cannot represent a function's purpose in the name, then your function is doing too much, and you should apply Extract Method.
Of course in the real world this is not always practically applicible, but it covers the trivial 70% of code that really doesn't need documentation. What it does it minimize the need for comments, which often make it harder to read code.
I sometimes get, uhh..."creative", before I program. End up with variable names like "$iHateThisProgram" and "$godFinWorkAlready"
Everyone once and a while, while implementing a hack I don't like, or a feature I disagree with, or something, my willpower will break down, and I am forced to name a variable or method with a name like stupidTwoPass[relevant part]Hack() instead of just the "relevant part" if, for example, I'm doing two iterations through a list instead of one, and I don't like the fact.
Of course, at work we have a standard of using// HACK: IB - Doing extra iteration because [reason]-style comments when we do stuff like that.
For a really good resource on why this is, and how to make your code actually live up this ambitious declaration, check out Refactoring by Martin Fowler. Most of the comments I write are about things that have some external significance... hacks, basically.:|
While this idea about this book is to improve the design of existing code, it's somewhat nontrivial to apply in practice on some nasty, tangled, obtuse code that tries to do too much. Rather more trivially, it makes new code that I write, and then the maintainance of that code, much better.
-If
PS: I've found both Refactoring and Analysis Patterns by Fowler to be well-written and insightful. Substantially less dry than works by his counterparts (Kent Beck, Gang of Four, etc).
I'm not a big fan of graffiti... but I think the keyboard is fine as long as it's qwerty. I've seen people get very good at those things, and typing for me in general is WAY easier than writing. I'd love to be able to use the Dvorak layout, but I've never been brave enough to make the switch.
He has definately been one of the most influential writers in my life, I'd put him on a par with Vonnegut. There is a whole category of contemporary authors/thinkers I like to call "Science Fiction Philosophers," which both Adams and Vonnegut belong to. Vonnegut is a little more blunt with his philosophy, while Adams is more fanciful, but their views of the life and the universe (and so on) definately come out in the books, and it has touched many people's minds. My mom read HHGthG to me when I was an impressionable young kid, which perhaps explains some things...
While I doubt you are the only person who dislikes DNA, It's hard to realistically say that his works aren't important to many, many people. For some reason, the "geek community," which I'm not really sure I belong to (if it even really exists), has adopted his writings as one chapter of a "geek bible."
I've never been so attached to anyone I've never met as to him.
Yeah, except a building that fails to survive a 5.2 earthquake is likely a termite-infested tool shed that was held together with scotch tape.
Honestly, even during the 7.2 Loma Praeta quake we had when I was in Junior High, I got up, stood in the doorway, went "Woo hoo!" and then sat down again and continued playing Curse of the Azure Bonds on my 286.
At one point, RealPlayer had some evil trickery in it's install. There was one step which was "Which spam do you want to sign up for?" and the interface was a scrolling list of checkboxes next to "newsletters" you wanted to subscribe to. You could only see 4 newsletters at a time, and all the newsletters were unchecked by default... or SO YOU THOUGHT... if you took the time to scroll down, EVERY spam that was below the scroll window was CHECKED by default, so if did not notice that it scrolled, or assumed they were decent people and wouldn't do such evil things, you were inadvertently opting-in for a barrage of spam!
So I decided never to use them again, regardless of all the other annoyances that they fob off on potential customers.
Perhaps some of those deaths seem suspicious, but please: a murder-suicide by an associate of the deceased? I really do not see how the "spooks" could cause something like that.
Haven't you ever seen a movie? These guys were late 30's, early 40's... chances are this guy Huang had a family. He was probably given a choice of who dies, his family or this lady. Of course he chooses his associate, but then cannot live with the guilt. Mystery solved!
State law mandates that the yellow lights must be at least 4 seconds long[...]
I know laws don't generally make sense, but this law does not make sense. The length of the yellow should be proportional to the speed limit of the road it is governing!
I actually agree with you entirely and, presumably, we already have that technology. I would much rather be a "killing-free" meat-eater than the killful (?) meat-eater that I am. I'm waiting for this to be available at Black Angus.
On the old MUD I used to play on EOTL, We had a Pacifists guild. They had their "kill" command revoked. They could duplicate flyers and pass them out for experience... if they were in a room with combat, they could also hold protest "sit-in"s to gain experience. The more pacifists sitting in, the more experience everyone got. They eventually got powers such as halting combat and various other interesting things. Their guild base was a coffee shop.
You can get creative with these things. It shouldn't all be hack and slash! Think of it: Prostitute class. Some people are having net sex anyway, might as well get experience for it! You'd have to deal with VD and stuff. It would be great.
Slashdot Mirror
I think this is a troll, but I'll respond anyway. The belief in a God (or several), while spiritual, is not necessarily religious, so I'm not immediately offended by Bush's statement. He doesn't specify which God, or even that he specifically means one specific God. I'm a wishy-washy agnostic, and I personally find religion distasteful, in general. But, if the President of my country is a Christian, that's fine with me, as long as he doesn't force me to be a Christian. In Iran, religious sins are illegal, and severely punished. In America, SOME religious sins are illegal, mainly because they hinder the functioning of society in some way. The fact is that most religious sins are sins because they are bad for society. The problem is that legislating them can enable fundamentalists and other extremists to take things too far.
Of course, religious groups will always try to legislate their agenda, just as the large media companies try to legislate theirs. And some of it gets passed, and most of it doesn't. This is what checks and balances are for, and we have them precisely so one President who panders to a particular religious group will not destroy the nation and it's religious freedom.
If we start hurting or discriminating against Muslims because people who were Muslim attacked the US (even if they claimed to do it in the name of Islam), then we are taking away the religious freedom of everyone. There are many Persians that are not Muslim, but they don't go advertising it. We can, with lame-ass symbols on our cars like the fish, Star of David, or Darwin-Fish-with-Legs - or however we like to do it.
-If
An interesting note... Arab Muslims and Persian (Iranian) Muslims follow different sects of Islam. They are akin to the Protestant and Catholic sects of Christianity. They don't get along all that great, from what I hear, at least when it comes to religion... much in the way Catholics and Protestants have a distaste for each other. (I know some 7th-Day Adventists that don't even consider Catholics Christian, but that's somewhat extreme). I believe that Arabs are primarily Sunni and that Persians, and many other kinds of non-Arab Muslims, are mostly Shi'a.
The problem with Iran is that it is run by an extremist religious government, just like Afghanistan was with the Taliban. Most Arab nations, such as Lebanon, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, are 90% Muslim, but the clergy does not hold absolute political power, as they do in Iran. One thing they ingrain into our minds here in the US is the importance of the seperation of Church and State. I think we grow up knowing that it is important, without necessarily understanding why. When you see what a Church-run-State does to a country (under the Shah, Iran was a much nicer place to live), I think it makes a lot more sense.
I think religious governments do tend to be extremist, and extremist governments are dangrerous, which is why we fear Iran right now. I know several Persians, and I don't know any of them that wanted the Ayatollah Khomeni's revolution, and they certainly don't like the current religious regime. It's just important to seperate the religion and people of a country from the government.
-If
If you want a long term goal, MAKE ONE YOURSELF.
Why, that's a fantastic idea. I think I'll set a good long-term goal for myself and ratify the Kyoto Protocol at my earliest convenience.
I like to set small goals that might lead into larger ones, like making toast: this might lead into making a sandwich, and possibly my own space program. -- Stephen Wright (I think)
I got my girlfriend a PlayStation for Valentines Day one year. She thought it was the best Valentines Day gift she'd ever gotten.
The best gifts are things you wouldn't ever get yourself, but you find you can't live without once you have them. Cash/gift certificates might be useful, but they are terribly unthoughtful.
Besides, younger girls are far less chained to the 50's female gender roles that so many people can't get their heads around. Many girls actually like math and science, and like to hammer things or work on the car. My younger (female) cousin ASKED for a toolset last christmas. And, yes, she hugged it when she got it - but the point is that these stupid male/female roles don't make as much sense anymore. And good riddance to them!
Now, I'm going to go take a nice hot bubble bath...
-If
Yeah, actually... I haven't played with Mozilla much, I'm sure there's a relatively simple way to do it, but with IE and hidden iframes, you can send and retrieve arbitrary data to the server without reloading the page at all. Since IE can dynamically rewrite (almost) any part of the page, you can update the data on your page, or even the UI, while still working off of the same "document". Great examples of how this is used well are all the web apps for doing taxes that I saw this year. Hell, look at MSDN online, they use DHTML all over the place to make it just that much nicer for the user. It was very nearly like using a native application, except no downloads and a little slower at runtime.
Most of what you would want to do is also possible in NS 4, but not nearly as easy as in IE. And NS 4 is definately quirkier in this aspect, and more prone to crash.
Even cooler is IE 5+'s (and I think Mozilla, now, but I think the mechanism is slightly different) ability to generate and view HTML pages with XSL + XML on the client side. So you could hit a site, and it would return an XML document with a processing instruction specifying the location of the XSL... IE will just grab the XSL and use it to transform the XML into HTML, and then display that resulting HTML. That's okay, but also easily done on the server side. The really interesting thing is that you have access to both the XML document and the XSL document via a DOM interface from the client-side javascript. So you can modify your XSL document and then re-transform parts of the XML document into HTML snippets, and then replace parts of the current page with the resulting HTML.
It makes for a very responsive web application - feels like a sluggish native app instead of a set of web pages - but it locks you down to a platform fairly prohibitively. NS 4, Opera, Lynx and most other "independent" browsers do not have XML+XSL support, so you pretty much lock those out. You can't use the same XSLs for server-side transforms and client-side transforms if you want to do the dynamic client-side stuff, really. There might be a way to do a Mozilla and IE cross-platform solution with this, but I haven't investigated it at all.
We did a lot of this at my last company. We had a web application for managing certain database objects, and you could run searches and you'd get back a data set by loading the data (as XML) in a hidden frame, then we could sort the data by making a strategic change to the XSL in memory and retransforming a strategic part of the XML, so it happened in a blip. We even supported pagination completely on the client - we were in a situation where the client to server network connection wasn't really the bottleneck, since both were intended to be on the same internal network. Client memory/rendering speed was the bigger bottleneck. Both bandwidth and table-rendering speed cause this sort of thing to really stop scaling for larger datasets. It also uses a TON of memory, because the (w3c) DOM is a bit heavy, and with this method IE retains everything in a DOM, whether you like it or not.
I suppose this is all somewhat off-topic to a story about a search engine, but this happens to be something I have worked with recently, so I thought I would mention it.
Other good DHTML links:
-If
I would love to look up to a moon glowing with cities and life! I would finally feel like I'm living in the 21st century. It's not like we are endangering wildlife...
-If
howbout RealLife?
Is it based on the comic?
-If
No kidding... most people I know are incessant channel changers, and I am happy to put up with commercials as long as I don't miss part of the show I want to watch.
I remember the first episode of the Max Headroom TV show, they had these commercials that went by super fast, and they found that people would subliminally pick up the message. But then they found that people would explode if they watched those commercials too much. Ironically, I feel that way when people switch channels too much, and less that way by enduring the commercials for 3 minutes.
-If
Why is thinking of humanity targets in ages of hundret years so wrong?
Because then the people living and working towards those goals will not live to see the results. And as much as advancing faster than we can "handle" is probably a bad idea (shortsighted, anyway), not living to see the fruits of our labors is a pretty terrible thought, in my mind. It's selfish, but at least it's realistic. I want to rent an apartment on the moon! I want to live to be 200! I want to have a cybernetic big toe with oil slick attachment! Now!!!
-If
Well, JNI and ActiveX are not 100% pure Java...
-If
[...] a boss of mine once said we should never use comments that have the word "hack" or "bug" or "incomplete" because the comments could be used against you in a lawsuit.
Damn, I never even though of that. It's probably quite true. What a pain! I guess the solution is to come up with some code words for these things, like "PURPLE=HACK" and so on. Then we can say "Man, this code is PURPLE!"
// PURPLE: Doing an extra iteration for now.
-If
1) We can demand experience. We don't have to take the time to train someone and get them up to speed.
I've mentioned this before, but experience is not the best metric to determine whether someone is worth of employment. Sometimes you will get a better employee, and consequently better work, from hiring someone who is talented, enthusiastic and "gets it," but has little domain experience, than you would if you hired someone with top experience.
The reason is that experience is misleading. Intuitively you think that experience maps directly to skill/productivity in the general case. But, I've seen too many people with tons of experience that can't DO anything PRODUCTIVE (or what they do is misguided, error-prone and/or impossible to maintain). And I've seen green folks who can just pick up, figure out things and get it done quick and done right. Of course, someone who is talented, motivated AND has 10 years experience will probably truly be "a badass," but there isn't the supply of these people that you think.
My favorite metric for looking at new hires is: Do they do this stuff at home? Even if they like to do stuff that is only somewhat similar to what you want them to do, and at an amateur level, if they do it on their own time for their own edification, it's probably because they like it... and people get good at doing the things they like real quick.
The long-term approach to hiring is to find someone that's a better programmer (or whatever) in general... even if it takes some traning to get productive with a specific domain, you'll eventually have a good employee with the domain knowledge you need, rather than a mediocre employee who knows the things you want right away. Oftentimes it's more convenient to grab the guy that knows the most right away, but you could end up with average or sub-average staff in the long run, which will turn into a nightmare.
Conversely, of course, you need someone with expert domain knowledge to be leading the charge, so that people do not re-invent the wheel. To require everyone to have that level of knowledge, though, is not only overkill, but likely counterproductive, as they will disagree on things that they think everyone just knows.
This is more from a development perspective than an IT perspective... perhaps the domains are different enough where these observations don't really apply.
-If
Well, one of the ideas behind Refactoring is that the code should be self-documenting. i.e. function names should convey the purpose of the function, and variable names should convey the purpose of the variable. If you cannot represent a function's purpose in the name, then your function is doing too much, and you should apply Extract Method.
Of course in the real world this is not always practically applicible, but it covers the trivial 70% of code that really doesn't need documentation. What it does it minimize the need for comments, which often make it harder to read code.
Read the book!
-DG
I sometimes get, uhh..."creative", before I program. End up with variable names like "$iHateThisProgram" and "$godFinWorkAlready"
// HACK: IB - Doing extra iteration because [reason]-style comments when we do stuff like that.
Everyone once and a while, while implementing a hack I don't like, or a feature I disagree with, or something, my willpower will break down, and I am forced to name a variable or method with a name like stupidTwoPass[relevant part]Hack() instead of just the "relevant part" if, for example, I'm doing two iterations through a list instead of one, and I don't like the fact.
Of course, at work we have a standard of using
-If
The best comment is the code.
:|
For a really good resource on why this is, and how to make your code actually live up this ambitious declaration, check out Refactoring by Martin Fowler. Most of the comments I write are about things that have some external significance... hacks, basically.
While this idea about this book is to improve the design of existing code, it's somewhat nontrivial to apply in practice on some nasty, tangled, obtuse code that tries to do too much. Rather more trivially, it makes new code that I write, and then the maintainance of that code, much better.
-If
PS: I've found both Refactoring and Analysis Patterns by Fowler to be well-written and insightful. Substantially less dry than works by his counterparts (Kent Beck, Gang of Four, etc).
I'm not a big fan of graffiti... but I think the keyboard is fine as long as it's qwerty. I've seen people get very good at those things, and typing for me in general is WAY easier than writing. I'd love to be able to use the Dvorak layout, but I've never been brave enough to make the switch.
-If
He has definately been one of the most influential writers in my life, I'd put him on a par with Vonnegut. There is a whole category of contemporary authors/thinkers I like to call "Science Fiction Philosophers," which both Adams and Vonnegut belong to. Vonnegut is a little more blunt with his philosophy, while Adams is more fanciful, but their views of the life and the universe (and so on) definately come out in the books, and it has touched many people's minds. My mom read HHGthG to me when I was an impressionable young kid, which perhaps explains some things...
While I doubt you are the only person who dislikes DNA, It's hard to realistically say that his works aren't important to many, many people. For some reason, the "geek community," which I'm not really sure I belong to (if it even really exists), has adopted his writings as one chapter of a "geek bible."
I've never been so attached to anyone I've never met as to him.
-If
Yeah, except a building that fails to survive a 5.2 earthquake is likely a termite-infested tool shed that was held together with scotch tape.
Honestly, even during the 7.2 Loma Praeta quake we had when I was in Junior High, I got up, stood in the doorway, went "Woo hoo!" and then sat down again and continued playing Curse of the Azure Bonds on my 286.
Good times...
-DG
At one point, RealPlayer had some evil trickery in it's install. There was one step which was "Which spam do you want to sign up for?" and the interface was a scrolling list of checkboxes next to "newsletters" you wanted to subscribe to. You could only see 4 newsletters at a time, and all the newsletters were unchecked by default... or SO YOU THOUGHT... if you took the time to scroll down, EVERY spam that was below the scroll window was CHECKED by default, so if did not notice that it scrolled, or assumed they were decent people and wouldn't do such evil things, you were inadvertently opting-in for a barrage of spam!
So I decided never to use them again, regardless of all the other annoyances that they fob off on potential customers.
-If
Perhaps some of those deaths seem suspicious, but please: a murder-suicide by an associate of the deceased? I really do not see how the "spooks" could cause something like that.
Haven't you ever seen a movie? These guys were late 30's, early 40's... chances are this guy Huang had a family. He was probably given a choice of who dies, his family or this lady. Of course he chooses his associate, but then cannot live with the guilt. Mystery solved!
-If
State law mandates that the yellow lights must be at least 4 seconds long[...]
I know laws don't generally make sense, but this law does not make sense. The length of the yellow should be proportional to the speed limit of the road it is governing!
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I actually agree with you entirely and, presumably, we already have that technology. I would much rather be a "killing-free" meat-eater than the killful (?) meat-eater that I am. I'm waiting for this to be available at Black Angus.
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This is the same argument vegetarians use, isn't it?
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What is on the second disc?
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On the old MUD I used to play on EOTL, We had a Pacifists guild. They had their "kill" command revoked. They could duplicate flyers and pass them out for experience... if they were in a room with combat, they could also hold protest "sit-in"s to gain experience. The more pacifists sitting in, the more experience everyone got. They eventually got powers such as halting combat and various other interesting things. Their guild base was a coffee shop.
You can get creative with these things. It shouldn't all be hack and slash! Think of it: Prostitute class. Some people are having net sex anyway, might as well get experience for it! You'd have to deal with VD and stuff. It would be great.
-DG